A sports epic, filmed on an iPhone
One Day At A Time, Season 3 Available Friday
This began life as a sitcom in 1975. Developed by Norman Lear, it followed the struggles of a divorced mother raising two daughters, often broaching controversial topics for its time. Netflix reimagined the series in 2017, with Lear as executive producer, and it was widely considered one of the best of a rash of reboots.
The new version still features a divorced mother, Penelope (Justina Machado), with two children and still tackles difficult topics and has earned praise for its depiction of important issues like immigration, sexism, mental illness, racism and homophobia.
It managed to be right-on while retaining its sense of humour and that was a winning combination for viewers and critics. The new season features a new love interest for Penelope, plus a spot of teenage rebellion for Alex who gets caught vaping. Penelope’s daughter Elena (Isabella Gomez) — who has come out as gay — is in a happy relationship with Syd (Sheridan Pierce), but Elena questions how to best introduce her non-binary partner, since “girlfriend” doesn’t appear to be the best term. And there will also be a much-fanfared cameo from none other than Gloria Estefan.
The Break, Season 2 Available Friday
There’s a case to be made that, with Making a Murderer and all of the other serial killer stuff, there is maybe a smidge too many crime procedurals on Netflix. But this Belgian series is both brutal and elegant and does deserve a look.
It centres around a broken police officer returning to his small home town, only to get drawn into a gruesome murder case that exposes the dark underside of the bucolic setting. In a sense, it could be a sort of French-language whodunnit.
But where The Break really excels, is in the slow building of tension, not to mention using an original narrative device which sees the ghost of the murder victim appear to communicate with the village’s inhabitants at the opening of each episode.
High Flying Bird (2018) Available Friday
There is lots of buzz already around this film, and, perhaps, rightly so when you consider who made it, what it’s about and how it was made. It’s a basketball film with very little basketball — that’s partly because it takes place during an NBA lockout, when play is replaced by negotiating, and the settings are chrome skyscrapers, not arenas. It comes from the Oscar-winning team of director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney who wrote Moonlight (which won Best Picture at the Oscars a couple of years ago). And then you learn that the whole thing was shot on an iPhone7.
Beyond all that, it lives up to the hype with an intelligent script and excellent performances, notably from Andre Holland (who also starred in Moonlight) as a desperate agent. It’s also an interesting think piece about athletes as pawns in the sports business and about the possibilities for a game that’s meant so much for a sport which has taken such a central place in American street culture, but is still mostly run by a wealthy, white class resistant to sharing power.
Hannah Gadsby: Nanette Available now
Once you get past Hannah Gadsby’s unbearably nasal Australian accent, this is a work of borderline genius that had many people swooning when it was released last summer. She’s openly lesbian, but identifies as “tired” and wants to know “where do all the quiet gays go?”
She wearies of being mistaken for a man, but consoles herself that for a few minutes “life becomes a whole lot easier”. She talks about an unexpected exchange with her mother when they discussed her coming out: “She said to me ‘The thing that I regret is that I raised you as if you are straight. I knew well before you did that your life was going to be so hard, and I made it worse. I made it worse because I wanted you to change, because I knew the world wouldn’t’.”
For years Gadsby had played the role of the enlightened lesbian who had to bring her mother along. “I looked at my mom in that moment and thought, how did that happen? How did my mom get to become the hero of my story,” she wonders, and the audience eats up this stand-up comedy act.